Multi-Coin Mining Switcher — Best Coin to Mine Now
Free multi-coin mining profitability switcher. Find the most profitable coin to mine right now with your hardware (RTX 4090, RTX 3080, Antminer S21).
Auto-switchers (NiceHash, Hive OS) handle this in real-time. Frequent switching adds DAG-load delay and pool re-share periods. Compare with stake-based passive options.
How to use Multi-Coin Mining Switcher — Best Coin to Mine Now
This Multi-Coin Mining Switcher covers five coins — BTC (SHA-256), KAS (kHeavyHash), RVN (KAWPOW), ERG (Autolykos) and ALPH (Blake3), ranks the ones the rig you select can mine (four for a GPU, one for an ASIC) by daily net profit, then names the single best coin to mine now. For each coin it computes gross reward as your hashrate times a per-hash daily reward constant times that coin's price, subtracts the pool fee, then subtracts your daily power bill. It sorts every coin by daily net and shows the switching advantage over the #2 option.
The math is daily net = (hashrate × dailyPerHash × price) × (1 − pool fee) − (watts × 24 ÷ 1000 × electricity rate). Hashrate is the rig's per-coin spec scaled by your efficiency slider, so 90% efficiency trims every coin's reward proportionally. A rating band (Highly profitable, Profitable, Marginal, or Unprofitable) compares daily net against your electricity cost, and the best coin's figures are extended to monthly net (×30), yearly net (×365) and profit margin. Pair it with our ASIC mining calculator for single-rig depth.
What do the inputs mean?
Mining Hardware is a preset pill — RTX 4090, RTX 4080, RTX 3090, RTX 3080, Antminer S21 (BTC) or Antminer KS5 (KAS), and choosing it auto-fills the read-only Power Draw in watts (450W for the 4090, 3500W for the S21). Electricity Rate (USD/kWh) has quick chips from $0.05 to $0.40 plus free entry, Pool Fee (%) defaults to 1%, and Hash Rate Efficiency (%) lets you derate from 100% to model real-world undervolting, thermals or pool luck.
GPUs are scored only on the altcoins they can mine, while the two ASICs are locked to their native coin (S21 to BTC, KS5 to KAS), so the ranking reflects what each rig can physically run. Yields are derived from network difficulty and emission measured on 2026-10-06 with built-in prices from the same day, so real returns drift hourly as difficulty, coin price and your network share move. Treat the output as a relative comparison, then verify live numbers and your true power draw before committing. To weigh passive yield instead, see our staking calculator.
How to interpret results correctly
The headline output is "Best Coin to Mine Now" — the coin with the highest daily net USD for your selected hardware, shown with a rating of Highly profitable, Profitable, Marginal, or Unprofitable at this rate. Read it next to the "Switching advantage vs #2" row, which tells you how much more per day the top coin earns than the runner-up. A thin advantage means switching is barely worth the effort and re-DAG delay.
Below the winner the "Coin profitability ranking" lists every coin your rig can mine (BTC, KAS, RVN, ERG, ALPH) sorted by daily net, with green for positive and red for negative. The "Best coin: monthly net", "yearly net", and "profit margin" rows scale that single best coin out over time. A coin can top the ranking yet still print a red number, that means it is your least-bad option, not a profitable one. Cross-check the winner against the mining calculator for a deeper single-coin model.
What scenarios can you model?
The core use case is picking what to mine today on a GPU rig. Select RTX 4090, RTX 3080, or another card, set your real electricity rate and pool fee, and the tool ranks KAS, RVN, ERG, and ALPH by daily net so you point your miner at the top row. Prices and difficulty here are a dated snapshot, so re-running it will not pick up a market move; when price or difficulty shifts noticeably, confirm the leader on your pool's live dashboard before you re-point hashrate.
The second use is ASIC reality-checking. Pick Antminer S21 (BTC) or KS5 (KAS) to see whether dedicated hardware clears your power cost at $0.05 versus $0.25/kWh, the electricity-rate pills make this fast. Use the "Daily electricity cost" row to find the kWh price at which the best coin flips red, then compare that breakpoint against your provider's tariff using the electricity cost calculator.
What should you check before you act?
- Before trusting the winner: 1) Confirm the hardware pill matches your actual card or ASIC, since power draw is fixed per device. 2) Enter your real delivered electricity rate, not the headline tariff. 3) Set the true pool fee your pool charges (usually 1%). 4) Lower the hash-rate efficiency below 100% if your card is throttled, on a riser, or in a hot room, overstating hashrate inflates every coin's net.
- After calculating: check that the best coin's daily net clears electricity by a comfortable margin, not by pennies. Note the "Switching advantage vs #2" — if it is tiny, staying on your current coin avoids DAG reload and pool re-share downtime. For any coin showing a red net, treat it as a do-not-mine; for a marginal winner, decide whether the upside justifies wear, noise, and heat before you commit the rig.
What mistakes make this calculation wrong?
- The biggest mistake is treating the prices and difficulty as live. The tool's disclaimer is explicit: it uses a dated snapshot of network difficulty and prices, so real yields fluctuate hourly with difficulty, price, and your share of the network. A coin that ranks first here can drop on a difficulty spike the moment a big farm points hashrate at it, never commit hardware on a single snapshot without checking a live pool dashboard.
- The second error is ignoring efficiency and pool fee. Leaving efficiency at 100% on a power-limited or aging card overstates every daily net, and forgetting the pool fee quietly shaves 1–2% off gross before electricity. People also forget that topping the ranking is not the same as being profitable, a winner with a negative net is simply the smallest loss, and the honest move is to power down rather than mine at any of the listed coins.
What is a realistic range to expect?
On a single modern GPU at $0.10/kWh, expect the best coin's daily net to be negative — about −$0.68/day on an RTX 4090 mining Ergo at October 2026 network conditions — because coin prices have fallen far faster than power costs. A top card needs under $0.04/kWh just to break even (about $0.038 on the 4090), so even $0.05/kWh power still leaves it roughly $0.14/day in the red. Watch which coins rank last: Kaspa and Alephium are now ASIC-dominated and pay a graphics card well under a cent a day, so the real GPU decision is Ergo against Ravencoin — and on the 4090 the two are effectively tied, with a "Switching advantage vs #2" of under a cent a day. On an RTX 3090, 3080 or 4080 Ravencoin still leads Ergo, by about $0.07–0.08/day.
ASICs change the picture, though less than they used to: an Antminer S21 (BTC) breaks even near $0.096/kWh and a KS5 (KAS) near $0.062/kWh, so at a moderate $0.10/kWh both still print red — the S21 at about −$0.35/day and the KS5 at about −$2.90/day. The S21 has the highest power tolerance of any machine on this page: drop to $0.08/kWh and it turns positive, near +$1.33/day. Dedicated units still dominate their algorithm, but only where power is genuinely cheap. Profit margin, daily net divided by gross, is the cleanest comparison; a healthy margin sits well above zero, while anything near or below it signals power cost is eating the reward. Verify the BTC leg against the ASIC mining calculator.
Execution templates you can reuse
Workflow: 1) Pick your exact hardware pill. 2) Set electricity rate from the pills or type your delivered cost. 3) Enter your pool fee and a realistic efficiency. 4) Read the top coin and its rating, then confirm the daily net clears electricity comfortably. 5) Check the switching advantage versus #2, only re-point hashrate if the gap outweighs DAG reload and re-share downtime. 6) Project commitment with the monthly and yearly net rows.
Treat the result as a shortlist, not an order. Before flashing your config, open your pool's live dashboard to confirm current difficulty and price still favor the same coin, since this tool runs on a dated snapshot. Auto-switchers like NiceHash or Hive OS automate exactly this decision in real time; use this calculator to understand the math and to sanity-check whether stake-based passive yield via the staking calculator beats grinding the rig.
Data hygiene and model maintenance
Refresh your assumptions on every session: electricity rates change with seasons and contracts, pool fees change with provider, and coin prices and difficulty move constantly. The defaults — $0.10/kWh, 1% pool fee, 100% efficiency, are starting points, not your situation. Re-measure your rig's true wall-draw and sustained hashrate periodically, because a dusty or throttled card mines slower than its spec, and feed that as a sub-100% efficiency.
Keep a log of which coin you actually mined, the realized payout, and the kWh you burned, then compare against what this tool predicted. The gap exposes how stale the snapshot prices had become and how often the leader flipped under you. Because the model assumes a fixed reward per hash, real network-share dilution will make your realized net trail the estimate during difficulty climbs, log it so your next decision uses honest numbers.
Final validation before capital deployment
Sanity-check the math: daily net equals gross USD reward, times one minus the pool fee, minus daily electricity, where electricity is power in watts times 24, divided by 1000, times your rate. So a 450W card uses 450 × 24 ÷ 1000 = 10.8 kWh a day (the "Daily power use" row) and at $0.10/kWh burns 10.8 × $0.10 = about $1.08/day, confirm the "Daily electricity cost" row matches that hand calc before trusting any coin's net.
Validate the ranking by spot-checking one coin: multiply its effective hashrate (your hashrate times efficiency) by its per-hash daily reward and its price to get gross, apply the pool fee, then subtract the same daily electricity. The result should match that coin's row. The "Best coin: monthly net" and "yearly net" rows are just the best coin's daily net times 30 and 365, so they always carry the same sign as its daily figure. For the break-even electricity price, lean on the break-even calculator.
Where these numbers come from
This calculator is driven by 8 tracked values. The most recent hand verification was 6 October 2026. Each value records the page it was read from, so you can check it rather than take our word for it — the full ledger is on the methodology page.
| Value | On this page | Source of record | Verified |
|---|---|---|---|
| BTC price + real per-TH/s daily yield (network-derived) | price 85816, dailyPerHash 0.0000004736752 | — market data | 2026-10-06 |
| KAS price + real per-GH/s daily yield (network-derived; tracks monthly emission step) | price 0.0429, dailyPerHash 0.005483011 | — market data | 2026-10-06 |
| RVN price + real per-MH/s daily yield (network-derived) | price 0.00245, dailyPerHash 2.520743 | — market data | 2026-10-06 |
| ERG price + real per-MH/s daily yield (network-derived) | price 0.330, dailyPerHash 0.003818203 | — market data | 2026-10-06 |
| ALPH price + real per-GH/s daily yield (network-derived) | price 0.0739, dailyPerHash 0.004427129 | — market data | 2026-10-06 |
| Hardware spec (market) | 200 | — market data | 2026-09-10 |
Showing 6 of 8. A dash under “Verified” means the value carries over from the initial audit without an individually dated re-check — not that it is known to be stale. See how we verify.
Authoritative sources
Frequently asked questions
What is mining coin switching and is it worth it?
Coin switching means automatically repointing your hashrate at whichever coin pays the most for your hardware right now, based on price, difficulty, block reward and pool fees. Whether it is worth anything depends entirely on how close the candidates are. At October 2026 network conditions an RTX 4090 sees Ergo and Ravencoin within about a cent a day of each other (Ergo is ahead by under $0.01/day), so switching between them is worth essentially nothing on that card. Kaspa and Alephium are not contenders at all for a GPU — both are now ASIC-dominated and pay a graphics card well under a cent a day. So on this hardware “switching between four coins” is really a coin toss between two. ASIC owners have even less room: an S21 is locked to SHA-256 and a KS5 to kHeavyHash, so there is nothing to switch to.
Which coin is most profitable to mine on an RTX 4090 in 2026?
Ergo (Autolykos2), but only just. At roughly 325 MH/s a 4090 earns about 1.24 ERG/day, near $0.41 gross at October 2026 prices — which is still −$0.68/day once you subtract 450 W of power at $0.10/kWh and a 1% pool fee. Ravencoin (KawPow) is a hair behind: about 164 RVN/day, roughly $0.40 gross and also −$0.68/day net, less than a cent a day short of Ergo — effectively a tie. Kaspa and Alephium look like options but are not: both networks are dominated by ASICs — an Antminer KS7 does 40 TH/s against a 4090’s 1.8 GH/s — so a graphics card earns roughly $0.0004/day on Kaspa and $0.0009/day on Alephium, three orders of magnitude behind Ergo and Ravencoin. No GPU coin here covers its own power bill at $0.10/kWh.
Should I mine Bitcoin or altcoins?
If you own an ASIC, Bitcoin — you have no alternative, and the economics are better than they look. An Antminer S21 (200 TH/s, 3500 W) earns about 0.0000947 BTC/day, near $8.13 at roughly $85,800 per BTC. That is −$0.35/day at $0.10/kWh, but +$1.33 at $0.08/kWh and +$3.85 at $0.05/kWh, giving it the highest power tolerance of any machine on this page. If you own a GPU, Bitcoin is not an option at all: a 4090 manages about 1.8 GH/s on SHA-256 against the S21’s 200 TH/s, roughly one hundred-thousandth of the throughput. That leaves altcoins — realistically Ravencoin or Ergo.
How does NiceHash compare to manual coin switching?
NiceHash rents your hashrate to buyers and pays in BTC, so you never pick a coin, never hold an altcoin and never manage a wallet — in exchange for a platform fee and whatever the rental market pays that day. Manual switching through Hive OS, Minerstat or a pool’s own auto-switch keeps the entire coin reward but leaves you holding an illiquid altcoin and doing the monitoring yourself. Which one nets more changes week to week with rental demand, so treat any fixed percentage claim with suspicion. For a single GPU the comparison is largely academic right now: the gap between the two is far smaller than the $1.08/day a 450 W card burns in electricity at $0.10/kWh.
What is the break-even electricity rate for crypto mining?
Measured against October 2026 difficulty and prices, with a 1% pool fee and each device at its rated power, on each card’s best coin: an RTX 4090 breaks even near $0.038/kWh on Ergo (about $0.037 on Ravencoin), while on Ravencoin an RTX 4080 breaks even near $0.036/kWh, an RTX 3080 near $0.041/kWh and an RTX 3090 near $0.047/kWh. The 3090 tolerates the most expensive power of the four because KawPow is memory-bandwidth-bound — it nearly matches the 4090’s hashrate while drawing 100 W less. Among ASICs, an Antminer S21 on Bitcoin breaks even near $0.096/kWh and an Antminer KS5 on Kaspa near $0.062/kWh. Above those rates you lose money every day, which is why $0.10/kWh residential power puts every device on this page in the red.
Does difficulty change make switching unprofitable?
Difficulty is the denominator of every yield on this page, and the clearest example is already on it. Kaspa and Alephium were GPU coins; ASICs arrived, Kaspa’s network hashrate climbed to about 3.2×10¹⁷ H/s, and a graphics card’s share collapsed to fractions of a cent per day. That is not a spike you can switch away from — it is permanent. Scheduled reward cuts do the same damage with no difficulty move at all: Ravencoin’s block reward halved to 1,250 RVN in January 2026, and Kaspa steps its emission down every month — it has paid 2.06017223 KAS per block since 5 October 2026 and drops to 1.94454365 around 4 November 2026. Switching handles short-lived price and difficulty gaps; it cannot rescue you from a chain that has structurally moved past your hardware.
